It is a movement that has always
appealed to my imagination. The idea is to establish and keep up to date
a record of the food supplies in the world with a view to the ultimate
world control of food supply and distribution. When its machinery has
developed sufficiently to a control in the interests of civilisation of
many other staples besides foodstuffs. It is in fact the suggestion and
beginning of the economic world peace and the economic world state, just
as the Hague Tribunal is the first faint sketch of a legal world state.
The King of Italy has met Mr. Lubin's idea with open hands. (It was
because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a not very
widely known book of mine, _The World Set Free_ (May, 1914), in which I
represented a world state as arising out of Armageddon, I made the
first world conference meet at Brissago in Italian Switzerland under the
presidency of the King of Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr.
Lubin I did so very gladly. We lunched together in a pretty little room
high over Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.
He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made to look
like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that compelling quality of
intense intellectual excitement which was one of the great factors in
the personal effectiveness of Gladstone.
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